The Pros (and Cons) of Journalism School
Choosing to go to journalism school (J-school) or not can be one of the bigger decisions you make in your life. Therefore, it’s important to consider a number of factors, such as your career goals, where you are in your life and career right now, and just exactly what you hope to get out of J-school.
You do not need a master’s degree in journalism to get a job as a journalist — plenty of people get their first news jobs right out of undergrad or through internships they had while undergraduates. Nor does having a master’s degree mean you would earn more starting out than if you only have a bachelor’s degree.
If that’s the case, one may wonder what the value is in a J-school degree. Plenty of seasoned editors will tell you that is a good question, and can point to some of the finest journalists in the business who do not have master’s degrees in journalism.
If you are staring down college graduation and still not sure what, exactly, you want to do with your life but you like writing and you think journalism looks interesting, then I would say do not go to J-school. It would be a hard and expensive way to discover that maybe you don’t like journalism so much after all.
If you are an undergraduate who is majoring in journalism or working as a student journalist, and you are sure you want to be a professional journalist, then I would say put off plans for J-school for at least a couple years.
Get some valuable work experience, earn a bit of money, and feel what it’s like to live in the world outside of school schedules (which you have been doing more or less non-stop since you were four or five or so), and then come to J-school. You will get so much more out of it than if you went directly from undergrad.
I give this advice from experience, as I entered J-school after working abroad as a journalist and editor for 10 years. I was far enough along in my career that I considered joining my program at Columbia as a mid-career master’s student, but opted for the regular program. I saw among my over 200 other classmates a range of folks, from those just out of school to people well further along in their careers than I was (and who were part of the mid-career master’s program), to everything in between.
Get Shawn McIntosh, Ph.D.’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
For those of us with journalism experience, I can tell you that learning was more about exploring new fields or topics within journalism and refining our editing and writing skills when getting detailed feedback rather than learning the basics, which is what some of my classmates who had no previous journalism experience were still doing well into the fall semester .
Another reason to possibly hold off on J-school is the cost. Graduate school isn’t cheap. Journalists don’t earn a lot of money. One may wonder on the wisdom of spending $80,000 or more on a prestigious J-school for a field where starting salaries are in the mid-$30K range.
It is a fair point, and again a reason to carefully consider what you really want to get out of J-school. I don’t have any quantitative data on how many of my former classmates got into or are still in journalism 25 years later, but anecdotally from those I’ve kept in touch with I only know of a couple. For the most part, their careers run the gamut, from law to fashion to financial marketing to real estate to fiction writing to bar owner and podcaster. I often wonder if these people felt like J-school was worth it for them.
So, costs are a potential serious downside — especially at the most prestigious schools such as Columbia, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, New York University, and University of Missouri.
However, the value with the most prestigious schools is the brand value they give you again and again throughout your career and the expansive alumni network that could help you land better jobs than without that social capital. That and the fact that most media organizations recognize that graduates from these schools will be competent and professional.
This is not to say you need to go to a prestigious J-school and spend tons of money. For example, lesser-known or newer J-school programs can be much cheaper and more innovative than some of the old standards, who may be slower to change their curriculums to adjust to digital media. CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, for example, is a solid program that has thoroughly baked in digital media into its DNA, and offers areas like bilingual tracks. Sure, it doesn’t have the name-brand value as it’s uptown and downtown competitors Columbia and NYU, but I have been impressed with what I have seen from recent grads in the CUNY program, and it’s much cheaper than those other two schools.
Another consideration on whether to enter J-school is if you think you’ll want to teach at the college level or not. If you are serious about a life in academia, then you’ll need to pursue a Ph.D., as the days of working journalists without advanced degrees entering and rising in the ranks of academia are over. You can read more about how to succeed in J-school and how to plan for academia here.
Even today most postings for adjunct teaching positions require a master’s degree, regardless of how much experience you may have as a journalist. If you are lucky you may get a visiting professor position or a short multi-year contract with the possibility of renewal with only a master’s degree, but most schools nowadays make it impossible for you to advance on a tenure-track line without a terminal degree (which could be an MFA of some sorts rather than a Ph.D. or Ed.D.).
You would not want to plan your retirement around being an adjunct professor, as those positions only pay you for the course or courses you teach, do not provide other benefits, and as an adjunct you are the first to get bumped off the courses when there are new hires of freshly-minted Ph.D.s starting in the department, regardless if they have less experience than you in the topic.
